Fair College Days

Dean of the College L. Fred Jewett '57 has been at Harvard for more than 30 years and in that period a lot of things have changed.

The structure of the place was a lot more formal," says Jewett, who worked dorm crew to help pay his college tuition. "We had to wear coats and ties in the dining halls."

Since his days as a government major, Harvard has greatly expanded its academic offerings, the dean says. "There's clearly been a great deal of expansion in the range of things taught," he says. "But I'm not sure things are any better taught."

Student life and diversity, though, has improved, Jewett says. Back in the 1950s a much higher proportion of the students came from private schools. "There was much more of sense of segregation back then," remembers Jewett, who attended public high school in Taunton, "A much higher proportion of the students belonged to the [final] clubs."

As rooms were priced on a graded scale by location and ammenities, Jewett, whose tuition was largely funded by financial aid, found himself on the fifth floor of Matthews Hall his freshman year with a group of other scholarship students.

"I didn't feel particularly out-of-place, but that kind of economic segregation by family income was a significant thing," he says.

As an upperclassman, Jewett lived in Lowell House, where rooms were also priced, until his senior year. "Back then, it [Lowell] was more of a broad-based house," he says. "It didn't have as much of an academic reputation. It was more like Quincy and Leverett are today."

While an undergraduate, the dean worked 10 to 15 hours a week on dorm crew, volunteered at Phillips Brooks House, served on the student council and played house sports. "I particularly enjoyed hockey, even though I was not very good at any of them," he says.

Academics also played a big role in his life as Jewett graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa after writing a thesis on diplomatic history. His topic was negotiations among the great powers in the 1890s. Jewett received additional diplomatic education from his work on the precursor of the model U.N.

Many of the same problems which plague Jewett as dean now were also present when he was an undergraduate. "People look back falsely to a golden age of the houses when life was more gracious," he says. "But in the fifties, they were as crowded as they are now."